As with everything in and about Tintin, Thomson and Thompson are really interesting characters. They are a lot of things: as well as being identical (but not genuinely twin) idiots, they are: a) police and b) (at least in translation, idk about the original French, where they have different names) English: the only explicitly English characters out of the most frequently-recurring in the Tintin books (that is, Tintin, Snowy, Haddock, Calculus, the Thomsons).

Now, I have nothing at present to say about them being police, and I have only something rather biased about them being English: rather, what I want to bring out in this short piece is how to read Thomson and Thompson as being politicians, or rather, how to read politicians as being like Thomson and Thompson. Especially, perhaps, English/British politicians (this thought I have in this piece, primarily emerges from my meditating on their Englishness), but also, really, politicians generally at this moment (no more will be said on the question of nationality, but everything I have to say refers to my own national context, and who knows, maybe this idiotic Thomson-like mindset really does stretch back further for the English than it does for the Belgians, or the Germans, but I am not a cultural historian of this sort, and have nothing in particular to refer to, beyond perhaps Husserl’s sarcastic use of ‘common sense’ in the original English).

Two starting points: the world is in deep crisis at the moment, and the Thomsons are blithering, unbelievable idiots (they always get everything wrong, they always get hurt, they always make everything more difficult for everyone else). I want to show that politicians are like the Thomsons, and thus explain (in part) the global crisis as being a result of the blithering idiocy of those responsible for running it, idiocy indeed that is analogous to that displayed in the Tintin books by the Thomsons.

What does the Thomsons’ idiocy consist in? It is, I think, largely a result of their obliviousness. This obliviousness has two dimensions. Firstly, external: the Thomsons, when engaged with the world, continually do so in a way that is, without exception, incorrect: they continue down this incorrect path, with complete certainly, unreceptive to evidence, usually until they receive a physical injury of some sort (which, regardless of evidence, is usually enough to make them switch lanes). A typical example of this is in Land of Black Gold, where they immediately decide (p.4) that the epidemic of exploding car engines is due to the Autocart company doctoring the petrol (a not totally implausible hypothesis, of course, though it does in fact prove to be false) and proceed to get jobs with company to ‘investigate’, which eventually (amongst other escapades) results in them being thrown out of the shop when they accidentally explode their boss’s tyres as they listen in on him (p.6).

Secondly, internal: in part symptomatic of their external obliviousness (of course, the two cannot be totally distinct, just read Kant’s Refutation of Idealism), the Thomsons are primarily concerned with/caught up in issues resulting from their own misunderstandings in interpreting the ‘state of play’ in reality, misunderstandings that only they share. Thus, in Explorers on the Moon, when the engineer Wolff reveals himself as a mole, responsible for smuggling aboard the moon rocket a former foe of Tintin’s, Colonel Jorgen, the Thomsons declare to everyone that they have “a vital question” and, rather than asking anything remotely intelligent, ask Wolff if he was “the skeleton” who the Thomsons (having been frightened by a model skeleton) arrested in Destination Moon (p.46): something that is not only totally ridiculous, but also something that only they care about (and more than this, despite being in a rocket on the moon that is slowly running out of oxygen: the only thing they care about). A further manifestation of this is their frequently-used “to be precise,” an apparent clarification that always makes whatever the other one just said more nonsensical, “A real stroke of luck hitting this road.” “To be precise: we’ve really had a stroke!” (Land of Black Gold, p.29)

(incidentally, Land of Black Gold features a whole long sequence where the Thomsons continually draw the wrong conclusions as to whether or not the phenomena they see in the desert is a mirage and end up diving into the sand one moment before kicking an Arab up the arse or driving their jeep into a lake the next; finally they even initially refuse to help Tintin at one point on the ground that he is a mirage, before realising that “mirages are seen but not heard” (p.33); perhaps the best Thomson mirage moment though is when the one exclaims: “Goodness gracious! A mirage!” and the other replies: “A mirage? Really? I thought they’d been abolished.” (p.19) – a perfect send-up of their ludicrous legalism)

Now, it does not take too much of a genius to see that this is really how the politician operates. The contemporary party-politician is not somebody who is engaged, properly speaking, with the world. They are simply not interested in the actual outcome of what they do, but rather are interested in what they do as moves in language-games in the politico-media ‘chess board’ (or a less lame image than that, or whatever). A particularly profound example of this is the recent Labour decision to endorse austerity. It is clear to anyone who understands anything about the world that ‘austerity measures’ are not a valid thing to pursue, economically. If we didn’t already know that they would, theoretically, fail in the conditions of a recession (which by the way we did) then we know, empirically, now, that they will. They have failed, wherever they’ve been applied. And yet it is clear from recent Labour remarks like the famous ones by Ed ‘pissing himself’ Balls and these from Douglas ‘stained with Cameron’s piss’ Alexander that at least the Labour party, and outside them ‘the media’ generally (being, the London-based print media) think/assume that in order to be ‘credible on the economy’, one must be seen to in some measure endorse austerity.

But it is only in the context of the language-game of parliamentary politics that such remarks could possibly make sense. People in the media, and people involved directly in Westminster politics, asssume, thanks to the ‘terms of the game’ that the Tories have set, internally of Westminster, that in order to be ‘credible’ on the economy, one needs to endorse austerity, and that up until now Labour have seemed ‘not credible’ because they have failed to do this. But in fact all the evidence out there in the world tells us – not even merely suggests, in fact tells us for certain – that austerity is not a good idea, even if you are ‘the markets’ (we often get “the markets are telling us” as an appeal to abstract authority) because the economy is hollowed-out and ready to collapse completely not just in part but in fact directly because of (as if even with the banking crisis it ought ever to have got this bad) government austerity measures. But every politician – Labour and Tory the same, only seperated by a mere brustling of the moustache and a lack of ‘p’ (as in Venezuela) – fails to recognise this because all they understand is their own particular set of coherence-norms in relation to the isolated Westminster community. And this is all the media, really, understands too. And this will, as with the Thomsons, persist until every politician physically falls down the stairs, or into a wall (i.e., the economy actually collapses and no one has any money and everyone is laid off).

(it is also not to be forgotten that whenever the Thomsons try to fit in, they fail abjectly. So, in The Blue Lotus they try to look like ‘Chinamen’ and dress up in ludicrously stereotyped early Qing dynasty outfits that lead to them being ridiculed by everyone (p.45); in Land of Black Gold they try to disguise themselves as sailors and dress in insanely anachronistic outfits complete with ‘Titanic’ written on their hats (p.7); in Destination Moon they appear in Byron-style ‘Greek’ outfits having asked the man in the costume shop for Syldavian outfits and apparently being cheated (p.19); this should of course remind us of the many attempts by ‘the politician’ to fit in with anyone ever, which they almost always fail at, William Hague in baseball cap)

(as a final note, we should comment that Herge took the Thomsons’ ‘look’ from his father and his uncle, who were twins. The politician is, of course, always already a quite ridiculous father figure, who makes us want to cry: “No Dads!”)